Po' Boy

"Po' Boy" is an acoustic folk/jazz song written and performed by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan that appears as the tenth song on his 2001 album Love and Theft. It was anthologized on the compilation album Dylan in 2007. Like most of Dylan's 21st century output, he produced the song himself under the pseudonym Jack Frost. Background and composition "Po' Boy" was one of the earliest songs Dylan wrote for Love and Theft. Guitarist/multi-instrumentalist Larry Campbell recalls Dylan showing him the song's unusual chord changes shortly after Dylan and his band had recorded the Oscar-winning song "Things Have Changed" in 1999: “They were relatively sophisticated changes for a Bob Dylan song...That was the first inkling of what the material might be like – taking elements from the jazz era and adding a folk sensibility to it". Critic Tim Riley also noted the song's relationship to jazz, claiming it "almost sounds as if it could have been recorded around 1920. [Dylan] leaves you dangling at the end of each bridge, lets the band punctuate the trail of words he's squeezed into his lines, which gives it a reluctant soft-shoe charm". Dylan scholar Tony Attwood describes the song as "a walk through the heritage of American culture" due to the preponderance of the phrase "po' boy" throughout the history of American popular song. He also notes the song's references to the Southern United States and the use of vaudeville-style jokes (including a knock-knock joke) in the lyrics as well as one decidedly non-American influence: Japanese author Junichi Saga's Confessions of a Yakuza, a non-fiction book from which Dylan appropriated phrases. In their book Bob Dylan All the Songs: The Story Behind Every Track, authors Philippe Margotin and Jean-Michel Guesdon also discuss the song's referentiality, noting how Dylan even throws two Shakespeare characters, Othello and Desdemona, into the mix. Critical reception